Reviews

Crime, action. Realistic and thus opposed to earlier yakuza-as-modern-samurai fiction. The start of the Yakuza Papers pentalogy, which spans several decades. This particular entry is a general description of the honourless underworld and the main character’s initial place in it.

Subject

Japan: a country where a badass can knock on the door of his comrade’s widow and ask to pray for his soul at the family altar. Criminal gangs beat themselves bloody in post-war Hiroshima from 1946 onwards. As stated in the intro to the second film, “For Hirono and a group of young men who had returned from the war, violence was an outlet for their rage as they confronted the chaos of defeat.” Here in the first film, the first shot pans across a photo of the mushroom cloud. The first scene is of American soldiers chasing a Japanese woman to rape her. Hirono Shouzou helps intervene, but is later tricked by his yakuza masters and goes to jail until 1954. In the end (1956?), he expresses his thoughts on the state of the mob at the funeral of a man he was sent to kill.

Commentary

Stylistic innovations include frequent stills, superimposed labels documenting significant appearances and deaths, and perfect musical themes. The Homevision DVD set comes with a good bonus disc of documentaries. The original title, Jingi-naki Tatakai, means battles without humane, just or dutiful conduct, especially with regard to or formalized as a criminal gang’s “code”.

Muraoka all but governs Hiroshima in 1950. A gambler named Yamanaka meets Hirono who’s serving time for murder. Paroled in 1952, Yamanaka falls in love with Muraoka’s niece, serving the family as a hit man. However, the niece was married to a suicide attack pilot and is not allowed another man except for the dead hero’s brother. Yamanaka breaks out of prison after a murder conviction to prevent that new marriage. Hirono is less active, as a semi-independent scrap guard with his own little gang in Kure.

Commentary

Lovely music. The massive melee half an hour into the film is very impressively realistic, and the “press conference” at the one-hour mark neatly ridicules public/tabloid romanticism. The battleship Yamato was built in Kure, adding resonance to the first shot of Hirono’s scrap heap; cf. In This Corner of the World (2016).